2009

On Tuesday I reported about the Alliance for Climate Education’s indoctrination efforts of high school students in five metro areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Boston. This week ACE is advertising to hire “educators” in their next target city, which is Washington:

ACE is seeking a dynamic, energetic individual to give presentations on climate change to high school students in Washington, D.C. The Senior Educator will eventually be responsible for managing day-to-day operations, fostering relationships with schools and local ENGOs in D.C., and identifying opportunities for and delivering lively, multimedia presentations to students in an assembly format.  The educator is responsible for setting up school appointments, traveling to area schools, conducting presentations to a group of 200+ students and faculty, following-up with students and faculty after presentations, refining/revising program content and working in close collaboration with other staff in realizing ACE’s goals and priorities. The D.C. Senior Educator will also help develop the overall organizational strategy for supporting the collective youth voice and determining how it can be a more relevant part of the overall climate movement.

Just what the public schools exist for: letting advocacy groups in to take kids out of their classes to get recruited for a “movement.”

Fox News/Rush Limbaugh watchdog Media Matters for America did climate realists a big favor last night by posting a segment without comment from last night’s “O’Reilly Factor,” in which host Bill O. interviewed AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi about California wildfires and global warming. As O’Reilly explained, he invited Greenpeace to send a representative to appear on the program with Bastardi but the group declined to do so. That left the well-respected weatherman to present plenty of evidence that the fires have nothing to do with global warming. Witness:

1. Given an opportunity by O’Reilly to slam Greenpeace, Bastardi says “I don’t want to disparage them. They’ve done some good things.” But then he adds, “in this case their house of cards (the global warming-wildfires connection) goes up in smoke.”

2. (Illustrating with meteorological maps and that cool telestrator thing) “Over the last two years…whenever the Pacific Ocean starts cooling, and global temperatures start to cool, California gets dry….All this cold water off California means the air sinks over the top of California; when it sinks it dries out, so global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California…”

3. (Showing a temperature anomalies chart) “To prove to you the globe is actually cooling, if you look at the [IPCC] their forecast was for temperatures to go up, up, up, and over the last 10 years you can see — in an up-and-down manner — they are coming down. So for the last 10 years, it’s cooling.”

4. “While the earth was supposed to be warming a little bit, the atmosphere over the tropics was really supposed to be warming up quite a bit. (Shows model of tropical greenhouse warming) What has actually been happening? (replaces with chart of “reality” in the tropics) Nada.”

5. (Posts chart of accumulated cyclone energy trends) “And consequently, an inconvenient truth is, the tropical cyclone accumulated energy is down at record low levels, not record high levels.”

Watch for yourself, and pass along a big thanks to both MMFA and Greenpeace for letting facts reach the public without adding their lies and spin.

There’s a new cost:benefit study from New York University Law School’s Institute for Public Integrity that, its authors claim, shows that, “From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 [Waxman-Markey] is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet.”  A good investment for the US? Really?

The authors recognize that the benefits they find are global, while the costs are located in the US.  So let’s see what benefits accrue to US citizens and at what cost. (I am working with the authors’ figures here, which derive from the EPA, and are significantly different from the figures provided by such groups as the Heritage Foundation or the American Council for Capital Formation, which find much, much higher costs.)

Highest possible benefit = $5.2 trillion / 6 billion people = benefits of $866 per person

Cost to US citizen = $660 billion / 300 million people = cost of $2200 per citizen

That means a best possible benefit to cost ratio for a US citizen of 0.4:1.

The report talks about thinking of the Waxman-Markey costs as a “highly effective, highly leveraged form of foreign aid.”  One has to doubt that, given that the benefits that accrue to the developing world do so mostly in the far future, while the developing world is in desperate need of greater wealth – and better access to energy – today.  Even if it were true, however, one wonders whether the American public will accept a de facto tax increase of around $1300 per person, or $400 billion total, to pay for such climate aid.

Yet that’s assuming that the “high end” benefits scenario is what occurs.  The global low end benefits are actually far outweighed by the American costs, leading to a benefit:cost ratio to America of something in the order of 0.05:1 (or a cost:benefit ratio of 20:1).

And, of course, there’s no guarantee that a reduction in American emissions will amount to a reduction in global emissions.  We have seen the response to European cap-and-trade schemes being the relocation of facilities to other jurisdictions.  If so, the effective foreign aid program of Waxman-Markey might actually be a loss of American jobs to be replaced by developing world jobs, with no emissions reduction at all.  That would be very generous of us, but not quite what the authors of this study have in mind.

To summarize, the authors of the study have conclusively demonstrated that the Waxman-Markey bill is actually a very bad deal for the United States, and their attempts to claim otherwise are just spin.

Today’s Greenwire (subscription required) carries a lengthy article on a nasty spat between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and California environmental groups over the proposed siting of solar electricity plants in the Sun-drenched Mojave Desert.

Kennedy — like his cousin-by-marriage Gov. Schwarzenegger — wants to allow ”alternative energy” companies to build solar power stations in the Mojave. As the Governator was widely quoted as saying, “If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.”

But according to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), David Myers of the Wildlands Conservancy, and others, the solar stations would wreck the habitat of the desert tortois, a threatened species under the California and federal Endangered Species Acts. Feinstein and Myers support legislation (not yet introduced) to designate 1 million acres of the Mojave as a national monument — an action that would preclude commercial development within the area.

On the surface, it looks like a conflict between those, like Kennedy, who believe that no merely “local” concern should interfere with the quest for a ‘clean energy future,’ and those, like Myers, whose loyalties are divided between saving a particular species and saving the planet.

Two tidbits from the Greenwire article reveal that the situation is a bit more complicated. One is that Kennedy has a financial interest in Brightsource, the company that would be building the solar plants if the Mojave project is approved. The other is that Kennedy opposes a major renewable energy project in his own backyard — a windfarm in Nantucket Sound, near the family compound in Martha’s Vinyard.

Of course, those with any experience of politics should not be surprised if sanctimony walks hand-in-hand with greed, or if the goose insists that sauce is only for the gander.

From the Energy Information Administration and the General Accounting Office (via the Institute for Energy Research):

Total Federal subsidies for electric production for fiscal year 2007 from solar power are $24.34 per megawatt hour, compared to 44 cents for traditional coal, 25 cents for natural gas and petroleum liquids, 67 cents for hydroelectric power, and $1.59 for nuclear. Solar subsidies for non-electric production in fiscal 2007 totaled $2.82 per million Btu, second only to ethanol/biofuels at $5.72 per million Btu. (Figures are in 2007 dollars.)

In fiscal year 2007, solar received 9.2 percent of all federal research subsidies to power generation but produced only 0.016 percent of U.S. electricity. Per kilowatt-hour, this was 1255 times higher than the amount allocated to coal, most of which was spent to develop cleaner technologies. Coal produced 51.4 percent of all U.S. electricity in fiscal year 2007.

So then, how does this happen (USA Today):

Investors holding solar energy stocks are getting one nasty burn. Shares of companies that make solar panels have flamed out this year, missing out on what’s been a significant recovery in the stock market.

Market leaders, including First Solar and SunPower, for instance, are down 12 percent and 30 percent this year, even as the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up 13 percent. And the Market Vectors Solar Energy ETF, which tracks stocks in the industry, is down 6 percent this year.

Is there any amount of taxpayer money that could be thrown at solar to make it efficient and profitable?

As Energy Tribune’s Robert Bryce explains today in the Wall Street Journal:

Politically correct bird kills:

Politically incorrect bird kills: